As predicted, President Bush nominated Air Force General Michael V. Hayden to replace Porter Goss as head of the CIA. And while the Hayden nomination brings with it a growing laundry list of problems, that's just fine with President Bush. After all, a fight is exactly what the Bush White House wants right now.
The smallest stumbling block comes from the President's own allies. House Intel chief Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) expressed concerns over putting a military person in charge of the civilian CIA:

"Bottom line, I believe he's the wrong person, the wrong place, at the wrong time. We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time."

Staunch Bush supporter Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia echoed Hoekstra's worries. Chambliss raised the issue of a direct Pentagon link to the CIA director's office, calling it a "major problem" and noting that "just resigning commission and moving on, putting on a pin-striped suit versus an Air Force uniform, I don't think makes much difference."
As its talking points suggest, the White House is no doubt confident that these initial qualms among its Congressional allies will quickly dissipate. But bigger battles remain with Democrats over Hayden's role as NSA domestic spymaster, his apparent disregard for the Constitution and his ties to disgraced defense contractor and Duke Cunningham sugar daddy MZM. Apparently, the Bush team sees its "terrorist surveillance program" as a winner politically and believes it can both win that fight and build on it for the 2006 mid-term elections. As Bush lapdog and Texas Senator John Cornyn put it:

"If Senate Democrats are looking to the Hayden nomination as an opportunity to attack the NSA's terrorist surveillance program, we welcome that debate. If the President's opponents hope to argue that we're doing too much to prevent terrorism, that the intelligence agencies are fighting too hard against terrorists around the world, then we look forward to taking that debate to the American people. Gen. Hayden and his colleagues in our intelligence forces need the right tools, the right focus and the right people to 'connect the dots' and prevent further attacks."

Recent opinion polls on the NSA program may seem to back Cornyn's claim, with a slight majority of Americans seemingly on board with the NSA's domestic spying. But Hayden's own words may come back to bite him. In October 2002, then NSA head Hayden may have broken the law when he denied under oath during Congressional testimony (ironically in response to a question from Porter Goss) that the NSA was eavesdropping within the United States, "That person would have protections as what the law defines as a U.S. person. And I would have no authorities to pursue it." That denial came even as the NSA program was underway for a year, a program about which Deputy Director of National Intelligence Hayden in January 2006 made the grandstanding claim:

"Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such."

Making matters worse are Hayden's flip comments about the Constitution's 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. As the Carpetbagger Report noted in January, Hayden repeatedly stressed a "reasonableness: standard," without mentioning the amendment's clear "probable cause" language:

"Just to be very clear - and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me - and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one - what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is 'reasonable.'"

It's no wonder ranking House Intelligence Committee Democrat Jane Harman concluded Hayden "made a big mistake" when he so vociferously defended the NSA's domestic spying. "That program," Harman claims, "does not comply with law."
Even if the President's handlers are right in their reading of the public mood regarding domestic spying, Hayden may yet be ensnared by the mushrooming scandal surrounding defense contractor MZM. MZM's Mitchell Wade, as you'll recall, provided bribes and prostitutes to jailed Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham, illegal campaign contributions to Katherine Harris and poker parties to Porter Goss' #3 at CIA, Kyle Foggo. As it turns out, MZM was also well acquainted with General Hayden. As TPM Muckraker reports today:

While director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden contracted the services of a top executive at the company at the center of the Cunningham bribery scandal, according to two former employees of the company.

No doubt, the Hayden nomination doesn't smell good and all but assures a fight for President Bush and the Republican Party. But as Karl Rove, Elizabeth Dole and other GOP leaders are already making clear in the run-up to November, that fight once again will be about the fear of terrorism, not Michael Hayden.